Social media can help firms reduce costs, nurture customers

By SMBWorld Asia Editors | Jul 16, 2010

0 comments

 

 

 

Digg

 Email

Print

Thumbnail: 

When deployed well, social media can be a good marketing and brand-building exercise for the company, as well as help reduce costs and call volumes to the contact center, finds Frost & Sullivan's recent market insight.

Frost & Sullivan notes that social media also helps increase sales and allows for online collaboration that solves customers’ queries without the intervention of an agent. "Regular feedback and collaboration through the social networking channel will also drive innovation for a company’s products and services," comments Audrey William, ICT research director, ANZ, Frost & Sullivan.

Williams notes that voice will still be the largest channel in the contact center space but more organizations are pressured by how customers are dictating. "They prefer to communicate about a service or product through social networking. That clearly means that some customers will choose not to contact an agent or write an e-mail but rather post their own video, join a forum and receive real-time updates when engaging with the organization."

While customers are increasingly using social media, organizations are afraid of bad press and publicity when something negative is said about their company. However, ignoring what is being said about the company via social networking can have a detrimental effect on customer care, warns Frost & Sullivan.

"An organisation will need to develop a special pool of agents or experts to answer Twitter or Facebook queries and postings. This could be contact centre agents or just a special pool of experts that work outside the traditional contact centre domain," advises William.

William suggests that key performance indicators (KPI) be set around metrics such as average time to respond to a social networking request, time spent on the request that generated sales, etc.

"Authority and responsibility on who should respond to social networking interactions must be planned well. For instance, decisions should be made around whether or not the customer care team should be responsible for social networking or if this should be in the hands of the marketing and PR teams only," said Williams.

Measuring and monitoring the success of such a channel is also critical, added Williams. Responses will be considered “old” even if they are attended to  within two days, thus a successful social networking strategy around customer care will have dedicated experts who can answer requests 24/7.